Soft-drinks cans are typically sold in packs of 24 cans, packaged into a cardboard case or carton. The operation of packaging cans into cardboard cartons has been the subject of continuing development over the years, whereby in conventional packaging plants the whole operation is now more or less completely automated.
However, one area in which introduction of automation has been slow is the area of un-packing the cardboard cartons from the boxes in which the cartons are delivered to the packaging plant.
Boxes containing e.g two or three hundred (flattened) cartons are delivered from the carton manufacturer to the packaging plant. Generally, the boxes are palletized for delivery. Typically, de-palletization has been automated, but the conventional practice then has been for the cartons to be unpacked from the boxes and placed into the magazine of the packaging apparatus by hand, or at least, if not actually by hand, by a procedure that includes more manual handling than is desirable in what is otherwise basically a fully automated procedure. Also, it is recognized that such automation as has been introduced into the area of unpacking the cartons from the boxes has been viewed rather as providing motorized assistance to the operator in his manual unpacking operations, rather than automation as such.
The present invention is concerned with automating the apparatus and procedures for removing cartons from boxes of the cartons, and transferring the cartons to the carton-magazine of the packaging machine.
The invention is described herein as it applies to the unpacking of flat-form cardboard cases or cartons from cardboard boxes, but the invention may be applied to unpacking items from boxes, in general.